PROGRESS REPORT

1999

Contents:

 According to the general plan the activities of the Project in 1999 were directed towards the completion of particular language segments of the translating dictionary in the respective local working groups predominantly, based upon the agreements and results acheived in 1998.

1. Organizational issues

Due to the fact that the basics of cooperation and technical work had been properly set in 1998, the key organizational issues in 1999 were focused as follows:

Unfortunately the British Council Köln had failed to carry out the promised translating and editorial work for Russian first, and then for the German and English languages as well, which became clear at a rather advanced stage of the Project in September 1999. The Stadtbibliothek Köln offered assistance of their professional staff to prepare the German part of the dictionary, so the appropriate documentation was exchanged and the Library sent the letter of intention. The agreements have not been signed yet but are likely to be signed in short time.

2. Technical progress

Expert working groups in the collaborating countries were busy preparing equivalents in their respective languages according to the guidelines and the core English language source material. The resulting materials in 11 languages have been converted thus building a consistently structured machine readable database ready for further processing. Latin and cyrillic alphabets appear as parallel scripts at all stages of processing.

The observation of the proposed time scheme depends largely on local circumstances which is reflected in the results attained. A number of working groups are not able to keep to the proposed timetable and there are new teams which have joined the project recently (e.g. for Hungarian and the prospective team for German). The delay mentioned above will no doubt influence the overall timetable of the entire project and the accomplishment of the dictionary; however, it will not influence the costs of the execution of the project.

The following materials have been prepared and gathered in electronic form (as of December 31, 1999):

In cooperation with a few selected working teams extensive test processing of the dictionary material was carried out followed by the printout of the dictionary and the word index in their particular languages. Selected were some languages where rather specific requirements are expected as to the character set, diacritics, and alphabet sorting (e.g. Slovak and Estonian), and cyrillic in general.

An additional set of 888 items (coverig the entire alphabet from A to Z) was established, partly taken from some recent dictionaries and lexicons, partly excerpted from original texts of the English editions of the ISBD standards. The material was sent to the 6 teams which had already accomlished the basic A-Z translation.

In September a working meeting took place in Bratislava in order to set the prerequisites for the printing of a separate English-Slovak volume with a Slovak index included. The dictionary will be published in January/February 2000.

The Slovenian team in Ljubljana have started activities needed for the publication of an English-Slovenian dictionary in July 2000.

3. Promotional activities

Promotional activities took place in a number of collaborating countries in order to demonstrate the work of the local teams and to justify the financial means allocated for the completion of the local language segments of the dictionary; on the other hand a number of activities were carried out to present the entire project:

4. Financial issues

According to the particular phase of the project when the major part of costly activities are distributed and carried out in local teams, thus paid for in their environment, the expenditures for the central activities and processing were rather low in 1999, covering above all the following items in administration, data distribution and promotion:

Honoraria for the editorial and some technical work will be effected when the entire project is brought to its conclusion.

Financial means for the publishing of the printed and the electronic edition have not been secured yet. This will be a major task in 2000.

5. Concluding recapitulation and evaluation of the results

Following the initial harmonization of technical and formal requirements, 6 national teams accomplished the translation of the basic A-Z material comprising 4.414 dictionary items; 7 teams have accomplished the translation of the A-R material, 9 teams have prepared the A-L material and 11 teams the A-C material, 3 additional teams are still dealing with A-D, and there are 3 further languages with teams potentially attracted (Croatian, Serbian, and Ukrainian). English and German represent an addition to the cited languages, thus the planned number of languages has been attained by far.

A particular problem arose when the British Council Köln failed to fulfill their promise to carry out the English and German part of the project; negotiations with new partners for these languages are still in progress.

The general progress of the project is slower than planned and has been delayed by the following circumstances in particular:

  • the above mentioned retreat of the British Council Köln and the editors for English and German rather late in the progress of the project
  • new teams joining late in the course of the project
  • some teams working at a rather slow pace
    Consequently it is not sure for certain teams if they are able to produce the expected material in any reasonable time limits. The possible reasons might be lack of financial and/or human resources and suitable organization of team work.
    The delay in progress is a mere question of time and will not influence neither the quality of the usables nor the financial issues.

    The necessary know-how has been acquired and tested through a number of conversions, processing and outputs in different languages and scripts, resulting in the first printed separate volume (English-Slovak) planned for January/February 2000, and the second one (English- Slovenian) in July 2000. Both national teams acquired successfully some extra money from their ministries for printing which demonstrates well the necessity for the planned dictionary in their respective professional communities.

    The general observation is that the project, involving 46 experts in working teams representing 15 European countries, follows the execution of the planned goals well, with the exception of the undesired delay in the production of the usables. Thus the preparation of the entire multilingual dictionary will be shifted into 2000 parallel to the efforts of finding a suitable publisher and the financial means for the printed and electronic publication of the work.


    Project Manager
    Ljubljana, February 4, 2000

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    Created February 3, 1999